Fort Hood: Lawmakers question whether warning signs were missed

November 10, 2009|By Josh Meyer and Greg Miller, Tribune Newspapers

WASHINGTON — The FBI and the Army looked into contacts between the Army psychiatrist accused in last week's deadly rampage at Fort Hood and a militant Islamist prayer leader but concluded he did not pose a terrorist threat, senior law-enforcement and military officials said Monday.

Officials announced Monday that Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan will be tried in a military, rather than civilian, court. They said they tried to interview Hasan on Sunday but that he declined after speaking to a lawyer.

Even before the disclosure that Hasan had ongoing communications with an imam in Yemen who had ties to Sept. 11 hijackers, lawmakers were calling for inquiries into whether the Army, the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community missed warning signs in the months before Thursday's attack, which left 13 people dead and 29 injured.

"I think the very fact that you've got a major in the U.S. Army contacting this guy, or attempting to contact him, would raise some red flags," said Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, ranking Republican on the intelligence panel. A federal law-enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the case is ongoing, said the FBI and Army are poring over e-mails sent by Hasan to Anwar al-Awlaki and apparently other Islamist figures this year and last.

But he said that the information known to authorities at the time did not suggest that Hasan was growing violent or involved in "any terrorist planning." The federal law-enforcement official said that Hasan did not appear to have known al-Awlaki in person, except perhaps in passing, even though the prayer leader was the imam at a Virginia mosque that Hasan attended in 2001.

Al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen, left the United States in 2002 and is believed to be in Yemen and actively supporting holy war against the West through his Web site.

Several U.S. officials said intelligence agencies first intercepted communications between Hasan and al-Awlaki in late 2008.